Stacks on Stacks

Midwest.io 2016

Aug 23, 2016

Today marked the end of Midwest.io, a two-day developer
conference in Kansas City. Being a Kansas City native, I really enjoyed the fact
that there was such a great conference held locally. Union
Station was a great venue for hosting the conference and it
provided excellent access to all of Kansas City’s downtown attractions.

This was my first Midwest.io and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. This
year’s theme was “Coping with Chaos”. Without further ado, though, here
are the recaps of my favorite talks:

Getting the Word out: Membership, Dissemination and Population Protocols

Sean Cribbs gave this excellent talk that
covered Comcast’s journey to create a P2P system
for pushing configuration and possibly code out to a vast network of servers. In
it, he covered many of the different protocols they considered using as well as
the tradeoffs involved. I really enjoyed his presentation of these protocols and
it got me thinking, “Where could or when would I use this in my code?”

Conquering Chaos to Land Humans on Mars

NASA’s Alicia M. Dwyer Cianciolo talked in depth about
some of the challenges that we will face in putting humans on Mars. She briefly
covered the history of NASA’s mars missions, particularly the rovers Spirit,
Opportunity, and Curiosity. Alicia highlighted that they run many tests and
simulations for “what if” cases to ensure a very small margin of error even when
facing such uncertainty.

Engineering a Contemporary Risk Management System

This was the first time I’ve heard a talk at a software conference from someone
at a fintech company. Piero Ferrante gave a great talk
explaining how C2FO is able to use their data to drive
smarter business decisions. He showed how they are constantly using machine
learning algorithms to come up with the best measure of risk when it comes to
small business lending. In addition, he gave numerous shoutouts to the python
packages they were able to use in conjunction with R to solve their problems.

Voice Controlled ChatOps

I have to give Aaron Blythe a hand on this talk. This was
one of the most entertaining talks I have seen in a while. In it, he briefly
talked about his experience working from home and the role that
Slack plays for his team. His demo is really where he nailed
it though, using an Amazon echo to open and close an incident in
PagerDuty with his voice and having the logs of his actions
appear in Slack!

Managing Complexity with Help from the 60s & 70s

Cerner’s Michelle Brush gave this great
talk that took us back to the 60s and 70s. I always love learning about data
structures, especially the closer you get to the 1’s and 0’s. The prizes for me
to be had at this talk were Quadtrees &
Z-order and their applications for spatial indexes and
compression. However, my biggest takeaway from this talk was that maybe not all
new problems need a new solution. Maybe your problem is equivalent to another
problem that already has a well defined solution.

Testing the hard stuff and staying sane

Professor and founder of QuviQ, John
Hughes, gave a very entertaining talk that made me think
twice about testing. During his talk, he demoed QuickCheck,
a fascinating utility for generating random tests that find failures in your
code. Unlike the standard unit tests, this method of testing seemed to find all
sorts of classes of problems that would otherwise not be found, including race
conditions. This style of checking seemed to be more enjoyable too, even with
his example of a circular buffer.

All in all, it was a great two-days and I learned alot. The conference was very
cozy and the presenters were nice enough to chat with me after the talks. If you
want to watch any of these talks, I believe they will be made available on the
YouTube page for Midwest.io.

Note: I’ll be linking to the talks once they are released on the Midwest.io
YouTube page